Poetry
Deyva Arthur | Robert L. Bangert-Drowns | Melinda Bruno-Smith | Phyllis Carito | Alan Catlin | Pam Clements | D. Colin | Natalie Criscione | John Delaney | Donna R. Dolan | Edward A. Dougherty | Claire Frankel |
Elizabeth Grisaru | Jill Grogan | Kendall Hoeft | Mary Judd | Samantha Ley | Maria Lisella | Brian Liston |
David Litwak | Gary J. Maggio | Dawn Marar | Joan McNerney | Robert Milby | Siniša Milenković |
Ambrosia Montague | Amy Nedeau | Leslie B. Neustadt | Stephanie Nolan | Roberta Obermayer | Susan Oringel | Alexander Perez | Lucyna Prostko | Laura Rappaport | Cheryl A. Rice | Carol Scamman | Fatima Shah |
Courtney Stern | Sally Valentine | Julene Waffle | Ellen White Rook | Dan Wilcox
A Variation in The Serenity Prayer
Deyva Arthur
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. (Prayer from AA)
“Grant me the serenity.”
Can I ask for that?
My peace is buried under experience and questions.
It is a thing that disappears when I look directly,
and reveals itself when I turn away.
Like a hand gentle on my shoulder,
from somewhere a whisper
“to grant yourself serenity – yes.”
The violence, the misunderstanding,
I cannot change.
Or the mistakes I made
three days ago when I said those things.
The DNA that makes me seem different to you.
And how hard the world shakes
something so fragile it breaks.
There is no stopping the declaration of my body,
growing up, growing old.
These things shriek at me until
I “accept the things I cannot change”
and I become the rock in the stream,
steadfast while the rapids flow by.
Reaching deep, can I conjure
the courage to change my ways?
Take hold with both hands
my hunger, relentless, demonic,
and bring it up close to my face.
To stop my own noise and really hear
what you are saying to me.
How much bravery do I need
to voice dissent, start a new politic?
To show myself with all my odd shapes and colors.
With slow steps I descend into the cave
to find a diamond made from unbearable pressure.
It is the “courage to change the things I can.”
When I have done a little thing,
that small effort, even though it is
only a half turn of the screw,
it is some movement to see.
A small blossom of knowing buds.
I learn the difference between
how much to water the delicate plant
and when to let the sun help it grow.
It is then, I feel I have taken a breath of
“wisdom to know the difference.”
Deyva Arthur is: photographer, writer, mother, activist, child, lover, forever trying to understand. She has received awards for her writings and photography of the human story to capture the quiet beauty of everyday life.
Deyva has been a journalist, photographer, editor, housing organizer, environmental researcher, counselor for refugees, the mentally ill, and the homeless, a secretary, construction worker, and sheep farmer.
Zinnias in a time of plague
Robert L. Bangert-Drowns
I am growing envious of gardens.
I observe their close associations,
Carnivals of color, vivid rioting
Declaiming nothing but their simple selves,
Their mindful drunkenness revealing
An ecstatic, shared variety.
In a desert of humanity, they oasis me.
I cannot keep my eyes from blossoms.
Mute and rooted, still they startle
With vivacious and inscrutable displays,
And tripping with their stalks and lights,
I cannot shake the notion they,
Not me, parade in motley motion, they,
Not me, escape in whimsied skip.
I am bound by mask, my hothouse breath
A stinking stifle and a steaming vapor.
These blossoms have undone the bud,
Unfurled like butterflies from chrysalis.
And bee and hummingbird attend
Their inward love and invitation, touch
Of stamen, stigma, nectar, and a restless sex.
That I might stand so close among my comrades,
That I might mimic my companions with such giddiness,
Savor sun and breeze, unfettered freedom,
Find my nudity is just this beautiful, as the bare-faced
Honesty and laughter of my friends. There is no
Contagion in these flowers, only little particles
Of pollen scattering in generation. I inhale.
Robert Bangert-Drowns has served on the faculty of UAlbany’s School of Education for 35 years. His background sits at the intersection of psychology and mental health, education for higher order cognition, and information technologies. He most recently is exploring human capacities to gain personal insights by understanding and embracing their experiences from multiple perspectives.
He grew up in rural Rockland County, New York and studied at Georgetown University and the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. He is author of innumerable poems in many different styles and sees them as opportunities for psychological and spiritual self-reflection akin to music.
Resilience
Melinda Bruno-Smith
I sit
In the center of the room
With eyes closed
The walls begin to crumble
Around me
I hear
Cries, anguish
My heart aches
For comfort and openness
I pray
My breath leads me
To a quiet emptiness
A stillness
Which allows me
To hear my own heart
I breathe
Sitting there
Without walls
Under an open sky
Time passes
And then
I rise up
Look around
And reach for the first hand
That will have me
Together
We stand
And join
The many
Whose hands and hearts
Unite around us
Melinda Bruno-Smith
Ironically, Covid Quarantine provided me with the opportunity to slow down, pursue personal interests, and be available for my family. I continue to work as photographer, poet, yoga instructor, deacon, gardener, wife, auntie, and head home chef. I feel fortunate.
New normal
Phyllis Carito
It’s about canceled until further notice.
It’s about your smile lost under the mask
the touch of your hand on my shoulder
for comfort or task
It’s about your hug suspended in air
6 feet away.
It’s about the canceled poetry class in Maine,
the plays at Shakespeare & Company,
the summer concert at Tanglewood, and all these
experiences missed,
never our friendship.
It’s about call ahead, pick up at the curb.
It’s about limited numbers in limited places
the space between keeping us safe --
but there are fires everywhere --
It’s about old hurt, pain and worry
all around us
It’s about the black youth shot on the street,
the immigrant children huddled in lockdown,
the police to protect and support
battering and pummeling
but everyone just wanting peace.
It’s about canceled until further notice
It’s about uncertain tomorrows
held in a holding pattern
postponed vacations, lost jobs
swirling minds conjuring a new normal
while lingering in a void
It’s about Zooming with family
caring for one another
planting a garden
adopting a pet
grasping for your ikigai*
*Japanese for reason to live, life realizations
of hopes and expectations.
Phyllis Carito
Publication highlights two chapbooks, barely a whisper and The Stability of Trees in Winds of Grief, and a novel, Worn Masks. Other published work appeared in Passager Journal, Inkwell Review, Voices in Italian Americana, Fired Up! and Vermont Literary Review. Currently is working on a short story collection.
Love in a Time of Coronavirus
Alan Catlin
Before the inevitable
days of judgment,
reckoning
with Death,
the fear of mortality
is a stimulant
like no other-
a prime motivator
for love ,
for exuberant lust
in all those
heat stifled nights
free floating,
miles from shore,
a yellow cross
painted on
our bow;
no land ahoy
for us to step
out on
Love each other
while you can,
we think,
the universal
virus is
among us
Alan Catlin attended workshops at the NYS Writers Institute held by John Montague, Lydia Davis, Le Ann Schreiber and Ed Sanders. His most recent books of poetry include Asylum Garden: after Van Gogh (Dos Madres), Lessons in Darkness (Luchador Press), The Road to Perdition (Alien Buddha Press) and Sunshine Superman (Cyberwit), among others.
The Great Pause
Pam Clements
We measure out moments
in the great world beyond our doors:
gas for the car
curbside pickup – dog food, birdseed,
a walk for stretched legs.
“Do you have your mask?”
Driving out of the cemetery
with my dog,
I saw two acquaintances, Franciscan friars, walking
on opposite sides of the road from each other.
I stopped the car
waving wildly, scrambling for my mask.
We bellowed happy greetings,
wished each other safe and well,
commended each other
to God.
Home cut hair,
stress baking,
a run on vegetable seeds,
return of the Victory Garden,
no mason canning jars to be found
in the county:
Who knew the Apocalypse
would feel so strange
and yet so ordinary?
Pam Clements's creative nonfiction and poetry has appeared in a number of literary journals. She is also author of a book of poems, Earth Science. She retired from teaching medieval English literature at Siena College just in time for the pandemic to emerge. As a result, she is enjoying the seemingly endless time to garden, play with her dog, and pursue nonacademic writing.
From the wreckage
D. Colin
I am less afraid of hell
after living through several
but I do fear
never escaping.
I’ve been trying to make
myself into the moon. Instead
I’ve chiseled me into a cage,
a collection of scabs I thought
I could use for thicker skin
so when the world falls apart
again, I am ready.
I have wrapped myself
in a loud kind of silence,
a jumbled quarantined
mess of language.
I thought this pain in my chest
was hunger but I think I have forgotten
the taste of my voice,
how I lick a word and press
it against my teeth
before it touches the air.
I’m still learning to care for myself
to free my face of this scream.
I am a gaping mouth made of bone
and afraid to die before
the poems leave my body.
D. Colin is is a poet, performer, visual artist and educator living in Troy, NY. She is the author of two poetry collections, Dreaming in Kreyol and Said the Swing to the Hoop. She is also a Cave Canem, VONA and New York State Writers Institute fellow. As a multidisciplinary artist, she aims to inspire, empower and educate through poetry, paint and performance and is passionate about cultivating space for stories, healing and community. (photo by Robert Cooper)
www.dcolin.com / facebook.com/poetdcolin /
twitter.com/dcolinpoet / instagram.com/dcolinpoet
Now
Natalie Criscione
Long ago,
on the Sunday night
before lockdowns,
I wondered
If it would be
her last.
Weeks passed
and she adapted,
or, we did,
washing her
as new lasts
slipped by,
carrying her to
the grass and
holding her
during midnight,
rain-soaked
wakings,
guiding her
to her food
or water dish,
lowering her
from couch
to floor,
hearing laments
broken
yet blithe.
We felt her morning
gaze of
resignation,
stroked her
still soft,
unhearing ears,
her body
curled
and subdued...
not the dog
she used
to be
but the one
she is
now.
Natalie Criscione wears many hats: student, teacher, editor, volunteer, artist, apartment manager, birth supporter, and lifelong writer, to name a few. She is a graduate of SUNY Albany’s School of Education and Colgate University where she studied writing with the late Fred Bush. Natalie lives in Albany with her husband, dogs, and their visiting adult children.
Symptoms
John Delaney
Across the window, clouds slow-motion drift
against a backdrop beatific blue.
While the country suffers pandemic flu,
I guess I’m one of the fortunate few
who doesn’t need to dream to be uplift-
ed. Each day is a new phenomenon
of weather, place, and expectations.
So far the signs seems promising but cold;
I came ready to work.
Listen to John,
my innoculated friends. Grow old
from immunity, but embrace infections.
Show symptoms of something: make that your perk.
Life is contagious if you don’t ban it.
Be thankful you were made for this planet.
John Delaney
In 2016, I moved out to Port Townsend, WA, after retiring as curator of historic maps at Princeton University. I’ve traveled widely, preferring remote, natural settings, and am addicted to kayaking and hiking. In 2017, I published Waypoints (Pleasure Boat Studio, Seattle), a collection of place poems. Twenty Questions, a chapbook, appeared in 2019 from Finishing Line Press.
Virus
Donna R. Dolan
So beautiful tricolor with its
Corona arms
But so deadly with its reach.
From a raging bat bite
To a peaceful lamb in
A busy marketplace.
From deep China across
Asia and Europe
To America.
Donna R. Dolan is a retired librarian who got her BA and MLS from the University at Albany. She also worked there and at the New York State Library and at BRS, an online retrieval service. She has published widely in the field of online literature.
COVID Diary
Edward A. Dougherty
If the virus, when the virus
gets into the prison, he told us,
we’re helpless. And so,
he joined the bleaching detail.
☼
When I touch my phone,
the number of cases
comes home to me.
As tests go out,
cases go up.
☼
The corona’s a halo
of protein spikes,
like golf tees
stuck into a sphere.
The lipid shell
contains RNA,
an unusually large
tangle of codes
—like a brain
in its skull?—
enabling it
to develop
a wealth
of gene-
expression
strategies.
☼
Night frays. Wakefulness
peers through the open weave.
Then questions: instruments
with one string playing one note.
☼
Sign in a café window:
We’re closed. See you
after the tempest.
Enjoy the wind!
☼
The villain of this story, enemy
in this so-called war, is just
a wild creature, this virus—
another animal wanting to live.
☼
amid oak leaves
one crocus
gold-yellow sunspot
rising over earthtones
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Holed up in his home in the Finger Lakes region, Edward A. Dougherty is a writer whose latest publication is Journey Work: Crafting a Life of Poetry & Spirit essays on his own apprenticeship as a poet, his work as a volunteer for peace in Hiroshima, Japan, and his evolving spiritual commitments, and how these all emerge to assert mutuality: our shared human experience, which we can traffic in via empathetic imagination.
He also teaches at SUNY Corning Community College and has been granted the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity.
Plague Year
Claire Frankel
Today I called
The New York Historical Society
Which had cancelled the Petraeus lecture
They asked me
Did I want to donate the cost of my tickets
Or did I want a refund.
Since they were first on my list
Of 6 venues for recouping plaguetime money
I said “Refund.”
I called five other venues
Met Opera (ABT)
New York City Ballet
Encore Performances
92nd Street Y
Streiker Center
And I got refunds.
Then I bought books on Amazon.
I may as well be living
In Kansas City, Mo
In Highland, NY
In East Yechupitsville
What is a City
Without its culture ?
Just another tumbleweed.
When this plague passes
In 2 months?
In 6 months?
In 12 months?
In 18 months?
Will we resurrect ourselves
Or will we be a different city?
I’m still not moving to the country.
There, it’s slow wifi
And all I can do is paint.
My painting is good
But it’s quite painful
Like this plague.
The first full day of Spring
The city birdies have been chirping all week
In the vines and bushes between
My building and the next.
They are courting
What do they know of
Coronavirus
In my next life,
I’ll come back as
A robin red breast.
Claire Frankel
I’m an engineer, although my degree is in Physics and Mathematics. Even though most established companies were not hiring women in 1976, I got into the computer (I.T.) field after graduating from college, then, because the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was something of a ‘start-up’ and they needed everyone with skills. For the last 44 years, I have worked designing financial industry databases.
I have also been writing poetry since I learned what a poem was (about 60 years ago) and have just begun to publish them. During boring corporate meetings, coffee breaks, lunchtime and downtime, I wrote poetry. My first poem, ‘Deskbound’ was published in Oberon Magazine in 2019. My first chapbook, Plague Year Poetry, is available on amazon.com; My second chapbook, Working Woman Poetry, can be ordered directly from the publisher, finishinglinepress.com, or from amazon.com. I am currently at work on my next book - a full length book of poems, Between my City and my Hudson River Valley.
After the virus
Elizabeth Grisaru
On the day the plague lifts
her black skirts and passes over
farm and church, dark concert hall,
firehouse, beach shack, shopping mall
something stirring indeep shifts:
a sideways lurch, a stumble step,
like a sleeper shocked awake
falling from a dreamscape cliff.
On the day we watch her back
shrink to the black horizon line,
statesman, pauper, poet wait
for the same stirring nameless shape
uncoiling tendrils within the earth
sheltered from the shrieking wind
that chases out the scent of plague
and rattles doorways on their hinges.
On that day strange things emerge:
sleepers straining to escape a dream
pin pricks in the musty loam
a million pale and tender cells.
Elizabeth Grisaru
I am originally from the Boston area, but have lived all my adult life in New York, the last 25 years in Albany. I work in State government on energy policy issues.
I started writing poetry a little over a year ago while I was walking through the corridor from the subway into Penn Station, on my way home after meetings in Manhattan, finished that first poem that night on the train, and find the words are still coming.
Bright star
Jill Grogan
The heart toys with emotions the mind remains unspoken the dusk defends us like people drifting apart.
feelings get lost, everything is tossed. The moon consumed the earth.
The hate tears apart everyone’s throat. Bright star is dimming I see it’s grasp on the sky.
Another stance is thinning. The sky is dusky grey.
the smell of rotted flowers on dirt roads. The sight of black wicked stems. the trees shadows are cold.
the brightest star it flickers and scorns the earth.
These dead feelings stripped my hearing. people gorge on their emotions. this moon steals my bitterness.
this land fulfills my emptiness. this night is the sound of life.
Counting my every strife.
Tonight is a reflection of every other day that passed, nothing really changed I’m still wearing this mask.
The bright star steals inner vein, it’s reflection in the blue tilled water, caused ripples that slowly drift away.
I’m missing, I’m not broken, I’m sorrowed, tonight’s choking.
Blue clouded in mourning.
Jill Grogan
I’m 21 I’ve been writing since I was young. I started with short stories and two years ago I began writing poetry. I attend SUNY Orange for liberal arts. I’m from Wallkill, New York. I’ve always loved writing because it’s how I’ve always been able to express myself.
The Star
Kendall Hoeft
—After Edgar Degas’ L'Étoile
I.
This is not the Degas with hands crossed behind her back
and one timid, pointing toe.
This prima emerges alone
from a shattered cave of jagged blue and orange
where, perhaps, she got stuck long enough
to eat her own body from the desperation
and the question of where to get water when one has to shimmy like a newt
scraping skin spelunking, bloody as it’s rubbed; on and on and onward.
And when the headlight went out, she was left
desensitized, writhing the void.
In the isolation of herself
she could only breathe,
asking: where are you soul?
where am I?
II.
Snug in a rock tunnel,
no perception except internal vision—
imagination center, her solitary hope;
as real as any scientific fact.
III.
Hearing the probing drip of some distant stalactite,
she ebbed her way toward the promise of space,
cave crawling, catastrophizing, till she
came into the open, where
she suckled the hanging mineral like some fetal pig
suspended and needy—
like she could be cut out of a womb
or slid onto a metal slab for some posthumous dissection;
a group of chubby, pubescent boys
giggling over her sleeping body,
cracking into her thin skin.
IV.
Still somehow, and mystically, she arose—
continued after death,
a resurrected christ
internal system smack down
a body conquered
death defied in a way
you can’t ignore still I rise
and when she dances now
there is no place for hiding.
She knows the depth of the tomb—
it’s dry longing, the suffocation, burial,
mellow low notes sung
while she was under their feet.
V.
She eagles her arms long,
stretching, like she did to survive;
but now she floats
triumphant,
cocks her head back.
She’s in holy water
drifting, from the stony shore.
Kendall Hoeft graduated from the University of Tampa’s Creative Writing M.F.A. program. She currently teaches writing online, for FIDM in San Francisco. Kendall was awarded the 2nd place prize in the 2020 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Contest and her poetry collection, Out of Water, was selected as a semifinalist for the 2019 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize. Her recent poetry can be viewed in Bad Pony Magazine, Patient Sounds, Occulum, Anti-Heroin Chic, Leveler, Driftwood Press and on her Facebook page: www.facebook.com/kendallhoeftpoet.
2020 Vision
Mary Judd
They say trauma can render us speechless. It can numb the imagination.
As the Corona virus spread,
silently, invisibly, randomly,
and as the world quieted and slowed, in one town after another,
and as my high-paced traveling came to a standstill
I expected myself to write fervently
To capture every morsel of this historic time
But my pen was slow.
An occasional doodle would include the word Pandemica
My own language seemed inadequate
Instagramatica emerged
As friends and family posted life events online, behind masks
A First Communion
First Day of School
New baby
New Fireman
Navy Commission
Zoom funerals
Election Day
Weddings
And then we saw George Floyd die
on television, online, again and again and again
And more than half a million, and counting, from Covid.
My new, age-old word became Guernica.
A name and a Picasso painting worth endless words…
Guernica. It circled around my mind for days
And on one of those days I knew what I needed to do
To reflect the horror
The strengths
And to fuel my esperanza. (Hope)
Mary Judd is a writer, artist, coach, and specialty program designer who loves to inspire others to connect to their strengths. Working with many leaders in field of Positive Psychology, Mary tapped her own strengths to co-found creative programs such as The Barn School (at Indian Ladder Farm) and SongwritingWith:Soldiers, a national program recently featured on PBS. Mary is a Colorado native who lived many years in Texas, and enthusiastically calls Upstate New York her forever home.
Put the Snowman Away
Samantha Ley
He’s waiting at the playground, during a snow flurry.
When I first trudge by, dragging two kids and sleds,
He’s purely a snowman
Three innocuous balls of snow
Later, my husband calls through the driving wind:
“Did you see this snowman?” he laughs,
Like he does when something’s funny-weird,
Like we’re all going to have a lot of questions.
It’s hard to tell in the gray-white blur, but
As I approach, I see that the snowman has a face.
Not a snowman face,
A human face,
With thoughtfully shaped human-like nostrils,
Lined, plump lips,
A furrowed brow with inscrutable eyes
Not enough detail to notice from afar. Just enough to make you wonder
How you didn’t see it from the start,
All on the top-most of
three
clean
white
balls of snow.
For days, we laugh and trade jokes about the cursed snowman, how:
He haunts the neighborhood children (maybe just the bad ones).
He is an ancient spirit, reincarnated near a municipal parking lot in Upstate New York.
He is the foreboding marker of yet another stage of this unending pandemic.
He is the manifestation of decades of children’s playground arguments.
He is an alien being, waiting to hitch an extraterrestrial ride home.
Frozen, he yearns for freedom.
A few days later, I bring my youngest daughter back,
Red-cheeked and open-eyed, she notices before I do:
“Where scary snowman go?
Someone put scary snowman away?”
And, she’s right. There is no trace.
Her voice pierces the cold, ripe with angst and her trademark insistence, lilting up at the
Ever-present question mark.
Staccato beats between each word,
Pausing to get each syllable just right:
“Someone. Put. Scary. Snowman. Uh-WAY?”
I will later share this with my husband.
He will quip, in the voice of the snowman:
“I have to go, my home planet needs me.”
And again, we will laugh.
But just then, as I push my daughter on the swing, staring at the empty spot,
I picture not a tractor beam, but a nearby shed
Or a cold basement
Or a restaurant kitchen
With reduced seating capacity but a
roomy walk-in freezer.
I picture him huddling, waiting,
Peering out from under thoughtful eyebrows,
Either someone put him away,
Showing a kindness,
Erecting a shield,
Against the cruelty of humans towards that which is different
Or else, he galumphed there himself in the dark of winter.
Perhaps he doesn’t want to just melt away,
Perhaps he hopes to last until the first hints of spring cross the ground.
Perhaps he hopes to slip back outside
Slide through the mud, briefly feel warmth,
To see, with his heavy-lidded eyes,
The colorful heads of crocuses
The green corkscrews of pea shoots
And if he’s lucky,
The sprigs of carrot greens
Pushing and unfurling into spring.
Samantha Ley is a graduate of Kenyon College and the University of Virginia. Her writing has most recently appeared in Fairfield Scribes, Albany Poets, and Manifest-Station. “Put the Snowman Away” was originally published by Albany Poets. She currently lives near Albany, NY, where she works as a freelance writer and editor.
Sometimes...
Maria Lisella
I pretend aging is a distant island
where broken birds go to recover, to practice
flying, to remember how to play. If it isn’t
an island, it’s a country with one eye
opened, the other shut, barring reality
from taking over the show. Reader’s Digest,
stalwart of mediocrity, started it all with
Hi, I’m Joe’s Heart, as if giving a body part
a script would shed wisdom on the inevitable
passage of time, how to roll it back, keep it
treading water. And now, a pandemic;
and aging has become an aspirational goal.
Maria Lisella was named a Poets Laureate Fellow by the Academy of American Poets in 2020.
Her collections include Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street, (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). Recent work appears in Big City Lit, MomEgg Review, New Verse News and Shrew. She is a travel writer by profession, co-curates the Italian American Writers Association readings, and contributes to Never Stop Traveling, The Jerusalem Post and the online bilingual La Voce di New York. https://marialisella.contently.com/
Starve
Brian Liston
I starve
for community,
connection
the dull routine
I took for granted.
I starve
for the usual,
to see the world
relaxed, at ease
enriching collective
outlook on the future.
I starve
for the arts
hoping for it to save me
from protocols; restrictions
confining me
inside a box
I wish to escape from.
I starve
until the oasis
shows itself
to us all
in its time
allowing us to
return, reunite
be refreshed to
a brand new world.
Brian Liston
I am a graduate of The Center for Spectrum Services, Saugerties High School, and SUNY Ulster. My poems have been in Chronogram, and my signature poem, "The Autistic Superkid," was published in Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers as well as my own chapbook, Through Autistic Eyes.
I have been a featured reader in the Hudson Valley, most notably the defunct Cross Street Atelier, The Cubbyhole in Poughkeepsie and the Colony Cafe in Woodstock, the Mudd Puddle and the Woodstock Poetry Society. I document my life experience on the blog, The Autistic SuperBlog.
Breathing in
David Litwak
drowning in a sea of air
throat closing with each
new breath
too much
too often
gushing into lungs that
haven’t pumped
hard since their first
breaths now trying to keep up
trying to hold back
the rush
the panic the sweat
the sweetness of the air
swelling around them
the hand of god reaching
down and shutting upon
my mouth
clamping down
the very breath
inhaled those many years before
down upon my mouth
take back my breath
down like a ramming rod
a strength i
can’t resist
taking back the life
i can no longer lead
pushing back
taking back,
back
the air
evacuating my lungs
sweeping out into the night
while i am so tired
my voice can no longer sing
David Litwak
I have lived in the Hudson Valley for many years working as a writer and editor. After spending a long career writing, editing as well as developing many magazines I have returned to my first love - poetry. Currently, I am putting the finishing touches on a new collection.
Road greys
Gary J. Maggio
the drabness of the dirt and wet leaves
over the bridge to Fenway Park,
thick strong couples in dark Sox caps holding
hands, the chill and warmth of
the city in September, Boston autumn
and the Sox out of it
but everyone is kind of in
college, Harvard is kind of in
masks, as is MIT and
BU and BC, the young are coming
and going, the Yankee greys are
in town, seeking normalcy,
diamonds that glitter with dust and
lush autumn grass and
we are all winners, there’s no
grey or blue White or Black
south or north dead or living
there are no losers
Poet, actor, and teacher Gary Maggio began writing poems when he was accepted into John Montague’s poetry workshop at the NYS Writers Institute in 1999. In the early 2000s, he created the Capital Region Poets Workshop, which met twice a month for over eight years.
He has also worked as an actor in the Albany area for the last decade, performing at Cap Rep, Curtain Call Theatre, Theatre Voices, Homemade Theater and Albany Civic Theatre. He works part-time as a “standardized patient” at Albany Medical College, acting for and teaching communications to medical students and residents
You can read more of Gary's poems and see his artwork at gmagikman.com.
Vexation
Dawn Marar
When Hani walked out of Walgreen’s
nothing in his demeanor signaled victory.
Comorbidities rested on his shoulders
as they always did, like military braids.
I leapt from the car, thrust open my hands
like Minnie Mouse. Well…?!!
He smiled, nodded, and I felt like the girl
he married in Amman forty years ago--the same
day the Americans were released in Tehran.
Each step my Beloved took upon the slush
parking lot puddle set in motion
the 8,409,600 breaths I’d held
hostage over the past year.
Dawn Marar’s recent work appears in Barzakh: A Literary Magazine and The Hong Kong Review. Her chapbook, Efflorescence, was published by Finishing Line Press. She was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and the Orison Anthology of Poetry Awards.
Her website is http://www.dawnmarar.weebly.com and her new project is a poetry workshop, “Moving Beyond Bloc-Whiteness.”
For a friend who is dying
Joan McNerney
Even though oceans
have been charted
mountaintops marked
there are no words
for your pain.
All the stratosphere
of heaven climbed yet
there is no course
through human sorrow.
Every muscle counted
and every bone but
no formula was written
for your grief.
In languages of
languages chromosomes
numbered named. What
can be said to your
sorrow, your pain?
Joan McNerney’s poetry is found in many literary magazines, journals and anthologies too numerous to mention. She has four Best of the Net nominations. Her latest titles are The Muse in Miniature and Love Poems for Michael both available on Amazon.com and Cyberwit.net
I No Longer Believe in the (State) Science
Robert Milby
There is a Crow, who arrived several weeks ago.
He sits atop nearby houses, watching.
Hidden in green, deciduous foliage:
condescending, chortling through the looking glass.
He was recently stricken silent,
as two Vultures appeared to raid a Robin’s nest,
obscured on a rafter, in the old, Victorian barn.
We tried to chase them away, as we watched their attempted pillage.
One Vulture is Fauci, the other, Gates.
They often wake just before dawn,
when the baby birds are still asleep;
parents are out seeking food, and children are alone.
Robert Milby of Florida, NY, been reading his poetry in public, since March, 1995. He is the author of several chapbooks, books, and CDs of poetry, and hosts four Hudson Valley poetry readings series in the Hudson Valley. Milby served as Orange County, NY Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019.
In Between
Siniša Milenković
There are things seen, sometimes in a dream, glanced through a prism between thoughts, the empty spaces between words on a page, the glints of dust through sunlight.
The vastness of the midnight broken by the streak of stars across the endless sky.
The emptiness I feel is not real, because Nature abhors a vacuum and I just can’t see all that’s in front of me, not even all the stars on the darkest night.
Instead I glimpse the things in between, the memories in my mind’s eye.
Just a ghost, in the streets, on the train, passing through strangers eyes the way reflections on storefronts shadow the passerbys.
My name is Siniša Milenković, my friends call me Sin.
I was born in former Yugoslavia and first came to the US for a summer to Asbury Park, NJ, in 1973. Back then Asbury Park was the Coney Island of the Jersey shore, full or rides, attractions and people. I thought this was America, better than any TV or film, only to return six months later to Albany, NY, no rides, seashore or attractions, just life like anywhere in the world. This transition, the first of many in 55 years, is part of my story.
Quarantine
Ambrosia Montague
(The days are endless, really)
Last week it was the clothes,
a lonely pile in the corner of the laundry room,
And washing the walls because it is the first week of June-
(Or something like that).
Monday, I did my makeup
And paid the bills for a world that doesn't quite exist
Except on Netflix, and
Tuesday, I sat, perched in front of my window,
Blue acrylic paint on the pads of chewed-up fingers,
Wrapped around a usual coffee and cigarette,
Even though I shouldn’t smoke-
(Or something like that)
Yesterday, I danced in sock feet and a t-shirt,
Sam Cooke on repeat
Sam Cooke on repeat
And right before the sun went down...
We fired up the grill,
Seasoned fat, red chunks of steak.
Wrapped bright, yellow cobs of corn in packets of foil,
With too much butter.
And I mentioned that I might start writing again-
(Or something like that)
Ambrosia Montague is a graduate of the University at Albany. A lover of coffee and late-night writing sessions, she resides in the Capital Region with her three children.
How to Make Time Move
Amy Nedeau
March, 2020-2021:
Drive, north, on mostly empty roads, past a mostly empty Walmart parking lot. This will be the most disturbing and abnormal thing you see.
Read, The Road, Station Eleven, anything apocalyptic, preferably listening through headphones while on walking paths as you don’t know how you’re supposed to engage with people anymore.
Welcome Zoom meetings. They are fine until they’re not, when faces on a screen become fictionalized like the Netflix shows you binge watch. And as much as you think you know a character and their lives by watching, they will never be a friend.
Eat like the food in the house wasn’t meant to be a stockpile. Then order takeout to support local and tip more than usual hoping a few more dollars will cure a substantial problem. Eat on a patio when it’s warm as a way of pretending everything is normal again.
Check your inbox - “Sorry, you’re not what we’re looking for,” in nearly every email whose subject line brings hope for half a second.
Hike for miles, and think about that emailed phrase, as if a person is something someone hunts for in the woods, like ginseng or truffles, rare finds that bring a profit. Find the top of the mountain through trails marked by others whose names you’ll never know, and scan the lake, buildings, roads through binoculars and wonder what it is you’re searching for through their lenses.
Go to a funeral. Cover your nose and frown, hug briefly and infrequently. Go to a micro wedding. Go to a drive-through baby shower. Say you’re trying to remember how to interact with people when you do something awkward. Later realize you should have said: I’m trying to learn how to interact with people now.
Notice the school bus once it starts coming again and wonder what the kids sporting their child-sized masks adorned with their favorite characters must be thinking.
Watch neighbors you’ve never seen before walk around the block, coaxed outside by puppies and strollers. Watch the mailman, then the FedEx truck, UPS in the evening.
Find podcasts that provide the same friendship fallacy as TV shows. Smother the lack of voices with recorded ones.
Be alone, be alone, be alone, and question every time anyone used the adjective lonely before.
Daydream, try to plan for anything while accounting for the disorientating lack of awareness of where the world will be positioned by the time anything you planned for arrives. Hope time will naturally slow when the things you’ve longed for return. Remember the problems you thought you had a year before and realize they were manufactured.
Wait for sunny days, then wait for them to pass when they come.
It goes: a slow imprint, a fast shift,
a stop, a start, a continuation,
current on a body of water. You may have a raft but no control.
Amy Nedeau graduated from the University at Albany with degrees in English and Anthropology. She was a participant in the 2019 NYS Writers Institute Community Writers Workshop. Amy grew up in Buffalo and currently resides in Waterford.
Symphony of Sounds
Leslie B. Neustadt
I
I imagine the vibrato of thousands
of ventilators around the world.
Whoosh click. Whoosh click. Whoosh click.
A universal language. People played
like instruments in a dark symphony,
orchestrated by an unseen conductor.
The steady sounds of a mechanical voce di petto—
Thousands of lungs unable on their own to take
in air and release it. Whoosh click. Whoosh click.
The steady rhythm moves air in and out
and in again. Heart monitors sing higher
notes, the heart’s steadfast hum.
If it sputters, the monitor alarm trumpets.
If ventilators oscillate, if a patient’s breath
wavers, or they clog like wind instruments,
a clarinet cries. Doctors and nurses hidden
behind protective gear rush in to play
an obligato, without which the music
cannot continue. They don’t want to play
a coda. Don’t want to hear a requiem.
But ventilators lament—despite their best
efforts, they cannot breathe life. Their ostinato,
their repeated rhythms, not enough to heal lungs.
The snare drums roll. The death knell resounds.
II
It’s almost half a century since my mother
lay tethered to a ventilator. She not much
past fifty. The whoosh click, whoosh click still
plays in my dreams. I sat by her side, begged
her to wake. Sang her, You are My Sunshine
as she had sung to me. No lullaby could stir her.
She fought the ventilator. Needed to be anesthetized
so she wouldn’t buck it’s insistent rhythm.
The ventilator unable to sing her back to life,
though it moved air through her lungs. After months,
my siblings and I set her free. I still hear her requiem
in the ICU. Now, no families allowed to sing
to their beloveds. To hold their motionless hands.
Thousands bid goodbye by doctors and nurses hidden
behind masks, who sing them a coda. Rush
to the next patient in the ICU. Da capo el fine.
Poet and visual artist Leslie B. Neustadt is a retired New York Assistant Attorney General and former board member of the International Women's Writers Guild. The author of Bearing Fruit: A Poetic Journey, Leslie’s work is illuminated by her Jewish upbringing, commitment to social justice and gender equality, and her experiences as a woman, daughter, wife, mother, and cancer patient. Online at www.LeslieNeustadt.com.
Transmission
Stephanie Nolan
To: my family
From: my white, air-tight capsule orbiting Sol 1
how are you?
it’s good to hear your crackling voice on the radio
I’ve been putting 0s and 1s in the right order
scooping fertilizer on my plants
peering out at the sun when I have the chance.
I don’t go outside anymore – there’s only darkness outside my door.
oh, you do venture out?
Did you know that there are living creatures in the air? That want to do you harm?
Did you know that earth’s a swarm?
That half of the population is being worked to the bone and the other half stays at home?
I don’t really know what’s going on …
I’ve been tuning in while revolving around the sun
I don’t often, though – Earth’s spinning far away
Wait, did someone say he’d rule the world, but he wasn’t a leader?
let me know when you have one and I’ll take my new friends to meet her.
oh, I’m fine!
breathing the same air as last March
marching in chaotic ellipses
I stopped being able to feel eight months ago
It’s hard to sleep with fake gravity
no, no, I don’t leave my capsule without a tether, don’t worry
my bones are weak, but I love you
I love you
I miss you
Wait! I’ve done all this research and … did you know? That light is > time?
Or was it time > light?
oh, time to go. I’m sorry.
when I get these 1s and 0s in order, I’ll blast home.
Stephanie Nolan is a bisexual fantasy writer and poet originally from upstate New York. She is quite possibly descended from a long line of Adirondack elves. attended the Troy Poetry Workshop with D. Colin.
Dear Humility
Roberta Obermayer
3/29/2021
Dear Humility/Humanity
re: This recent Insanity,
It has only now just occurred to me as I have been forwarding Trolley's open submission opportunity to a few Dear Friends, that I may write something too concerning what I affectionately refer to as "This Fucking Pandemic" aka "The Year of a Million Tears" aka "The Year of Making Lemonade." As I prepare to move for the fourth time in less than a year, I realize this may be the perfect time to assess or to reassess my own progress...my own process of navigating these historic and unprecedented days in The Insanity of Our Humanity. BTW- I believe it is time to change two words that I have used thus far-
#1 History- Time to Change this word to "Ourstory" because it's not just "his."
#2 Humanity- Time to change this word too...since "Hupeopleity" just doesn't sound right, I am open to suggestions from You.
I begin with my list of Lessons Learned.
#1- One Cannot Outrun Ignorance
Ignorance surrounds us. Ignorance lives within each of us. I have spent this year attempting to outrun this simple Truth and I ended up right back where I began. Like the song says "The killer in me IS the killer in You."
#2- "The Will To Believe" W. James
Pretty sure W. James got this right...Belief IS an act of Will. Last March when the death toll hit 400 in Italy overnight, I began to weep uncontrollably and as I witnessed the spread of this pandemic across the world my weeping became as relentless as the spread of the virus itself. Many days I wished I was not alive to witness this but I learned and am still learning that...
I can Choose to See all that is Good and/or all that is Horrific BUT
It FEELS BETTER to See all that is GOOD. It FEELS BETTER to BELIEVE that what we are witnessing is
THE SUM OF OUR HUMANITY
AMID CALAMITY
ARISE, ARISE
#3- The Lesson of NOW
Tomorrow is never promised for any of us. What seems important to me today is what I DO with this NOW. I find myself becoming more focused on what is most important to me....Family, Friends, Art and Nature....these are the things which give my life MEANING. NOW is The Time for each of us to Leave Our Mark.
#4- Expect The Unexpected
Just when I think things cannot possibly get more Bizarre, They Do! January 6th Capitol Coup is just one example for you.
#5- What is TRUTH?
Science is in FLUX...WTF! I have learned that we are all learning each day and that within the concept of "Fake News" there is Something GOOD which is to QUESTION EVERYTHING just as Socrates taught long ago and leads directly back to Lesson #2.
In conclusion, although I currently find myself without a place to call my own home, The Spirit within will not be defeated. This year has made me more Empathetic, more Compassionate, more Angry, more Determined, more Sober, more Humble ( I Hope), more Resilient, more GRATEFUL, more LOVING than I could have ever imagined...and, after all, Love IS Eternal...LOVE LIVES.
Roberta Obermayer
Graduate of Vermont College MFA in Poetry, 1999
Tutorial with Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo
Attended several poetry workshops at NYS Writers Institute
Interview with Robert Creeley in The American Poetry Review
Poems published in Ekphrasis, Passages North, Half Tones to Jubliee, Pasco Arts Council.
In the beginning
Susan Oringel
nothing was safe.
I remember fearing even the air, miasma, “mal aria.”
And if I went outside for a walk, or to my once-weekly
mail pick-up at the office, I’d spray the door knobs, light switches
with Lysol. They told us to, to kill the virus on the places
we most touched. Streaks still stand on the walls like dried tears,
the brass door knobs tarnished. And everything
brought inside, was deemed contaminated, the newspaper in its
plastic sleeve, packages and letters, food from the “outside”
whose wrappings had to be sprayed or “cured” for days
in the garage, so that the virus might die.
We didn’t go in stores but ordered food from a service.
Unknown helpers picked out unripe fruit, wrong cuts
of meat, brought two pint-containers of grated Parmesan cheese
when we had asked for the advertised Eggplant Parm.
No picking up a little this or that or a mostly prepared meal
to be embellished at home. I snatched recipes from the internet,
the newspaper, somehow not having the energy
to go through my collection of cookbooks.
There were smashing successes and many failures.
Two quarts of lightly burned soup still sit in the freezer.
Casseroles seemed to fill the emptiness best.
I’d thought we’d be fucking like bunnies with all our time
at home, but Mark was sure that he’d catch the virus
and then diabetes and heart disease would finish him.
And I kept worrying how we would get the food we wanted,
the tools we needed, light bulbs, hooks, nails, toilet paper, napkins.
Paper goods were rationed. And what about my arcane supplements?
Out of our loneliness we made friends with the birds who visited
our backyard feeder. The black-and-white-checked downy woodpecker.
The fiery red cardinal visiting with his drab wife, who sported
loud red lipstick. The mourning doves we called Fred and Ethel
and a flock of tufted titmice. In the kitchen I rooted avocado pits
for trees, rooted sweet potato eyes to make more plants. In spring
we made friends with the budding trees on our walks, the lacy, spiky
red maple buds and flowers whose red spikes reminded us of COVID.
We were--can you see? --a bit obsessed. Depressed.
Our friendships had become two-dimensional. On ZOOM heads looked
and sounded like our friends, but they weren’t—quite. Many days I was
too tired to talk to anyone on the phone. Our boy cat howled for attention,
day and night. So, we got him a playmate, a beautiful gray and orange girl
with a harlequin face who trilled and loved to play. But out of nowhere
our old neutered boy tried to hump her, grunting and grinding like
some awful lounge lizard. We refereed until she fought back.
Three people dear to me were diagnosed with Stage IV cancer.
And as the pandemic wore on, we all learned to live with what we could not control.
Susan Oringel
I am a poet and writer, a teacher of creative writing, and a psychologist in private practice in the NYS Capital District. My chapbook My Coney Island was published by Finishing Line Press in June 2019.
A graduate of the Warren Wilson M.F.A. program, I have published in various journals, such as Blueline, The Maryland Poetry Review, and the National Council of Teachers of English English Journal. A story is forthcoming in Tiferet Journal, Spring 2021.
I also served as co-translator for a collection of Latin American poetry: Messengers of Rain, published by Groundwoods Press in 2002 and 2011. Fellowships and awards include Individual Artist award from the Albany-Schenectady League of Arts, a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and an SOS award sponsored by NYSCA. I taught creative writing at Hudson Valley Community College from 2004-2017.
'Twas
Alexander Perez
Merry Christmas to the believers
if you believe Jesus could fix this mess
but I’ll take the gift anyway
I couldn’t find the Christmas Star
lost as a Magi, I searched for the holy one
You could say the Star is two heavenly bodies kissing
but now Jupiter and Saturn must be tested
>>>Back off! Six feet from this poem! It germinates>>>
The fallen snow returns skyward as vapour
I don’t dare breathe it in unless masked
They thought vapours caused the Black Death
now we face Black death on the regular
Not only nature causes plague
it’s poverty, slavery, war
man-made
I apologize for my Christmas poem
it’s been quarantined a year
not used to being exposed
it wants to know if truth’s contagious
Not sure to whom to send good tidings:
the dead
the dying,
the living,
or the being born?
I don’t think we’ll ever be the same
Funny, as a child, I had
gifts candy song
I wished for peace on earth
and oddly, my wish didn’t come true
My Christmas dream returns
anxious
wrapped in red-stained fur
stomping on the rooftop
The Yule log burns brighter than a holocaust
Hope is on a ventilator, breathing its last breath
The ward nurse
recites
as we take our
nightly psych meds:
“Happy Christmas
to all
to all
a good night.”
December 25, 2020
Alexander Perez (named after his paternal grandfather Alejandro) is a queer, bipolar, non-gender conforming, addicted, traumatized cancer and domestic abuse survivor who doubles as an administrative assistant for the University at Albany. And one who sometimes finds the words.
Heading to School for Summer Cleaning during Covid-19
Lucyna Prostko
“... to break down the thing that is you.”
Garrett Kurai from “Know No Boy”
Heading down to school,
listening to the news
of a storm turned tornado
that might or might not strike,
I prepare myself for the fragments
of an old self. She will be
strolling down the empty hallways,
painted blue, orange, and green.
And then, the mute piles of papers,
unreturned folders, bookmarked
passages from “Self-Reliance,” smiling-
face doodles and cross-outs,
all scattered on my desk
waiting to be cleaned.
I imagine the frazzled
silhouettes of students,
in their box-like
rooms, leaning into the mirrors
of their screens, longing
to touch something beyond
the chatter and silence,
or the misty web
of fear.
The click-click
of an absent-minded
keyboard. Concerning
the future, I must not
ruminate for too long.
Turn the key, step over
the edge of a doorway:
the smell of new lilacs
struggles to fill the stunned
square of absence,
the maple outside unfurls
its sorrows and hand-shaped leaves.
Lucyna Prostko, a Polish-American poet, received her M.F.A. at New York University, where she was awarded the New York Times Fellowship, and her PhD in English from the University at Albany.
Her poetry appeared in various literary journals, including Fugue, Washington Square, Painted Bride Quarterly, Quiddity, Ellipsis, Salamander, Cutthroat, One Jacar Press and Five Points. Her first book of poems Infinite Beginnings was a winner of Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. She lives in the Adirondacks.
We circle each other, avoidant
Laura Rappaport
We circle each other, avoidant.
Middle-aged mother, stripling son, alone together in our pandemic house. Snow falls.
He who used to orbit me as though I were the sun, crow like Peter Pan, wait for my approving glance or touch on the cheek, now offers a fist bump for a hug and patters away to his home underground.
Head buried in handheld device as though it were the last sweet acorn, or a signed Mike Trout rookie card.
Looks not up nor meets my eye when we speak.
Silent, surly, salty, he spins away. Yet remains home -- nowhere to go this afternoon or any afternoon this year. No Lost Boys to meet or pirates to fight.
After supper:
Again a device is a magnet, this one larger, on his desk to complete a task due as they all are now at 11:59. Not to be turned in when the bell rings, for there is no bell.
(No hallways to roam, no lunchroom to navigate, friends to jostle in the rush to class.
No. Now just roll out of bed, boot up for lessons that will dissipate as soon as the screen closes.)
So close, yet so distant. It’s the natural way of things.Teenage son on the cusp of manhood leans toward friends, away from mother.
I wash the dishes pondering his future, nostalgic for my own youth, when it was out, out, out after dinner. Into the arms of friends, to town, the woods, the park.
I yearn for normalcy for this boy, my boy, the sun about whom I have orbited these eighteen years, basking in the glow of his love, the joy of his crowing.
As night falls and forces of nature pull him away from me, he has nowhere to go.
But down to the basement to gather with his own band of boys in cyberspace, the town square of this strange, strange year.
Laura Rappaport is a writer, editor, and mother of two young adults who lives in Saratoga Springs. She lost her job due to Covid-19 in April 2020, about when her kids were sent home from college and high school. She counts it as a bit of hard work a lot of fairy dust that she is gainfully re-employed, and her kids have handled this uncertain time with as good an attitude as they could muster.
Pisces
Cheryl A. Rice
Papery arms creped and bubbled
not the only signs-
Air around, no vapor to be found,
vipers kiss lungs untouched,
thirst tempered by sip here,
sip there, bottomless satisfaction.
Father guppy, soundless gulp in the open clouds;
Mother seal, sensual carcass steaming onshore,
grey body housing remnants of long, matriculated winter.
It’s years since she’s seen a real ocean,
felt waves shift her position in shuttling sand.
Many creatures native to water cannot swim.
Long enough gone to forgive the tides,
back and forth of the moon’s obedient masters.
The turtle’s neck, slowly exposed at every meal,
hers now, too, better to swing droplets of disbelief away.
Pisces represents with two fish, side by side yet
swimming away from each other, two halves
of the same pulling apart, two organs
taken from her side, revenge,
force, or subconscious conflict.
Deep soil fades into time’s silver debris.
Sailing thru life’s not possible
for creatures born of voyage,
but a year’s worth of tobacco
crumbled onto their prismatic scales
hides no gift.
Morning’s urination, sluice gates between fins
open like a salmon river, rush to
meet the mating’s other,
birth and death both in the end,
no other way possible.
A mermaid’s tears invisible
in the grand scheme of oceans,
monopolize the earth’s majority.
Bitter, without color or cue,
they dribble down gills, face,
built to dissolve hope,
bring back moisture of tadpoles
asleep in their egg sacks, unawares.
Cheryl A. Rice’s poems have appeared in Home Planet News, Rye Whiskey Review, Up The River, and Misfit Magazine, among others. Recent books include Until the Words Came (Post Traumatic Press), coauthored with Guy Reed, and Love’s Compass (Kung Fu Treachery Press). Her blog is at: http://flyingmonkeyprods.blogspot.com/. Rice lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
The Lockdown Rules
Carol J. Scamman
Hey, Lockdown Ladies!
Go paint your faces
What for?
Just in case
Mr. Right’s at the door
And his stare demands more
Sugar, time to get dressed
You’ve got to look your best
Don’t say this is sexist!
Now quickly, don your masks!
Face masks won’t protect us!
They do too! Breathe! Don’t gasp,
Look for fat-wallet guys
Bait them with hungry eyes
You can “pretend” to yield
Slowly--raise your face shields
Make sure they got the jab
Before you “let” them grab
Don’t matter if he’s vaxxed
Shut up! Now quit the sass!
If he hates the measure
Don’t give him no pleasure
But don’t forget, Sweethearts,
You date ‘em six feet apart!
Carol J. Scamman graduated from Grove City College (1975) and earned her MLS at the University at Albany (1976). She has lived in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, New York, Louisiana, and Texas. While working as a librarian for 39 years, she published the creative nonfiction pieces, Road Tests of Covered Wagons, Sassparilly, and The Dirty Dozen of Wagon Packing, Or Do Leave Home Without Them in The West That Was, ed. Thomas W. Knowles and Joseph R. Lansdale, Wings Books (1993). She also co-authored several peer-reviewed academic publications. Her love of travel has taken her to Canada, Mexico, Peru, England, Scotland, Switzerland, and France.
There Is Intimacy In Shared Experience
Fatima Shah
During my first hour of 2021, I think about generational trauma.
My family survived the 1947 Partition of India.
Collective trauma can sometimes become collective healing,
operative words being “can” and “sometimes.”
If a generation can pass down trauma, can the entirety of a species? Sometimes? Always?
Held together by the universality of breathing, masks on our faces, holding our exhales close to our chests, not letting them venture far, not safe to share the same air as the people we love.
We used to share so much more than oxygen.
Turned inwards, alone for months; restricted to our most intimate connections.
(Families, roommates, clandestine lovers, other trauma bonding companions.)
This year has been hardest on friendship.
Friends, and friends of our friends, and partners of our friends. Friendly coworkers, idle acquaintances who would invite us to get coffee, go to a concert, dinner, game night.
Constant, daily, background hum of human contact,
casual interactions on sidewalks, smiles across the street.
I miss things I don’t even want to admit I miss.
Mandatory faculty meetings, overcrowded malls,
even bars full of drunk people I couldn’t stand,
obligatory handshakes at awkward events.
Maybe I just miss experiencing the full range of my own humanity.
We do not understand what we will have survived after this.
Indelible seeds are being painted upon our bodies,
invisible in the persevering darkness.
Resting before germinating,
getting ready to reveal themselves
in an eventual light of day.
Fatima Shah uses the process of writing to pull together her dozens of seemingly disparate interests, ideas, and identities. Weaving musings about her personal healing journey with weirdly elaborate science metaphors and unexpected rants about capitalism, she unapologetically brings her whole self to everything she creates. (Social media: @jasminegeekface on Twitter and Instagram. Website: www.fatimadoesnothing.com.Patreon: www.patreon.com/jasminegeekface)
The politician
Courtney Stern
Air trapped in a bubble
Caught in a storm
The oceans rips
The clouds cover in despair
The rest of the US
Silent anger revenge
Horns loud and clear
Flags unite
Courtney Stern
I enjoy reading and writing in my free time. I just adopted a puppy (Shepherd/husky mix) from a rescue shelter, who we named, Bella. I also love swimming, cooking, and trying new things. While COVID was extremely tough, I always liked to look for the positive silver lining, such as less traffic and more time to read and write 😊.
A Covid Prayer
Sally Valentine
Let me remember, Lord,
in days and years to come,
that the sun didn’t refuse to shine
(except on certain days)
and winter blew into spring,
and spring bled into summer,
and Jesus was still raised from the dead,
and we still flew our flags on the Fourth of July,
and the faithful hummingbird returned
to hover in the pink and maroon blossoms
of the rose of Sharon bush
that sits outside my kitchen window,
nourishing us both.
Sally Valentine is a graduate of UAlbany, class of ‘71. After teaching math for twenty-five years, she went off on a tangent of poetry. She is the author of There Are No Buffalo in Buffalo, an award winning book of poetry for mid-grade kids. Each of the poems is about a different place in NYS. She is also the author of a series of mid-grade novels, each set in a different landmark in Rochester, her hometown.
A Pandemic Irony
Julene Waffle
Sea turtles spend most of their lives alone
swimming oceans, searching for food. They live
50 years in solitary submersion.
Alone, by choice, they see the world through waves.
What was not natural
was being 96, swimming in loneliness,
waving to grown children
through nursing home windows, living in fear.
Children staring at computer screens
learning to navigate the ocean of their futures
without sails, without rudders,
without hands on oars.
Governors closing businesses,
farmers dumping tanks of milk in gutters,
people losing jobs, being labeled non-essential.
five million lives lost.
But the sun still rose and set;
the tides still rolled. The earth
still wound her way around the sun. Crops
still embraced the sky while our lives
crawled cautiously to standstill.
No soccer games. No drama club. No choir.
No travel. No birthday parties. No sleepovers.
No eating out. Those seemed small prices to pay.
And so loneliness dragged from summer
into long and empty winter.
But in that space--in that expanse--
there was something. There was time:
Time to focus on children, play board games, play outside.
Time to talk to trees and listen for their responses.
Time for phone calls, zoom calls, calls to write letters.
Time to craft, to bird watch, to ride bikes,
to read for pleasure, to take long baths.
Time to declutter and find lost things.
Time to self-educate, self-evaluate.
Time to exercise. Time to think.
And now what was normal before
looks something like old normal again.
Baseball games are scheduled.
Brides confirm wedding guests.
Children are sitting in classrooms.
Fitness centers and diners have reopened,
Vaccines settle into our immune systems,
invisible shields. And we are happy
for the return to something familiar,
for feeling safer. But
I can't help the undercurrent
running under the loss and waste of it all.
No matter how much I want to return to familiar shores,
a part of me longs for the quiet and time just to be.
Also published in American Writers Review: Pandemic Collection. San Fedele Press (2021).
Julene Waffle is a teacher in a rural NYS public school, an entrepreneur, a wife, a mother of three busy boys, and a writer. Her work has appeared in La Presa and The English Journal, among other journals, and in the anthologies Civilization in Crisis and Seeing Things, and a chapbook So I Will Remember. She has found solace in writing, nature, and her family during the pandemic. You can learn more at www.wafflepoetry.com.
Just another pandemic Sunday
Ellen White Rook
light traffic
eyes half on the road
I notice a man looking
at a car through his phone
a man with a black
watch cap
trim build
dark clothes
beside him
on the asphalt walk
a laid-down unicycle
rainforest green
he must be
taking a picture
of the small sedan
two doors
an ordinary blue
simply parked
I pass too quickly
to catch the motion
of the thumb’s press
such a subtle move
he wears glasses
with metal frames
that whisper around the lens
the spokes
are invisible
everything hazed
with salt
I am most likely
captured as I pass
our splintered time
intersecting
like the distant
beginning chord
of a once popular
song
Ellen White Rook is a poet and teacher of contemplative arts living in upstate New York and southern Maine. In the pre-COVID-19 world, she offered workshops on Japanese flower arranging and led day-long 'Sit, Walk, Write' retreats that merge meditation, movement, and writing. Like most people, she’s wondering, what’s next? Ellen is a recent graduate from the Master of Fine Arts program at Lindenwood University and a member of the New York State Institute Poet’s Workshop. Her work has been published in Montana Mouthful, New Verse News, and previous editions of Trolley Literary Journal.
Easter Sunday
Dan Wilcox
The painted stones left along
the path around the pond
are some child’s isolation project
like Babson’s carved boulders
in Cape Ann’s Dogtown
one even says “Courage”
but Roger Babson
would not have known
this child’s blue & green
& red stone’s protest
“Social Distancing Sucks”
Although Dan Wilcox once worked as a dishwasher & as a short-order cook, he has never driven a cab, or played professional baseball. For most of his career he worked as bureaucrat & wrote poetry. He was named one of the 2019 Literary Legends by the Albany Public Library Foundation. He claims to have “the World’s largest collection of photos of unknown poets.” Currently he organizes poetry events in Albany, NY & is an active member of Veterans For Peace.